Slow wireless transmission problem

Question

I have an XP SP3 Pro machine where I keep all my media. I also have a laptop with Windows 7 Ultimate and another laptop with Windows Vista Home. The thing is I want to be able to not only play my files from my media pc but obviously also transmit new media to and from it. Streaming from this PC is not a problem, this works fine, however when I want to transfer media it's waaay too slow, I'm getting transmission rates between 500 and 650kb/s. I use a D-Link DSL-2640B ADSL2/2+ Modem with Wireless Router, which has a rate of 54mb/s. I also tried to transmit in both directions, it's the same. If I want to transmit from my vista laptop to my pc, the same, from my vista laptop to my win 7 laptop, in every direction it's the same.

I've been googling arround and tried a couple of things:

• Disabled autotuning on win 7 laptop
• Removed Remote Differential Compression on win 7 laptop
• Removed IPv6 from network properties on win 7 laptop
• Cleared DNS Cache on win 7 laptop
• Changed the router setting from: mixed 802.11g & b to 802.11g since we're all in close range.
• Changed the transmission rate of the router to 54mb/s instead of automatic

None of these things actually changed anything I think, or maybe a little, the difference could be arround 100kb/s.

I also read about using netbeui which is supposed to be a faster protocol and disabling netbios in this way, but I didn't try this because It never really sounded that convincing.

I also didn't try to connect both laptops with utp cables and see what their transmission rates were to locate if the problem is maybe the router, I could try this when I get back home. Or if I had two xp machines I could also compare better.

Anybody has any ideas of what I could try next? Because If I want to copy an 8gb game this takes 4hours, which is slower than actually downloading it :o

Answer 1

You have to understand that megabits (Mb) and megabytes (MB) are not the same unit of measures. Connection speeds are usually expressed in bits per second while transfer speeds are expressed in bytes per second. There is 8 bits in a byte.

Since your router has a throughput of 54Mb/s (megabits per second), it means that the theoretical maximum throughput is of 6.75MB/s (megabytes per second, 54/8).

Take into consideration interference, signal attenuation, noise and other effects of using a wireless signal, you can come to expect anywhere from 2 to 4 MB/s (megabytes per second) in 100% signal conditions.

Your reported speeds seem right for 50%-65% signal strength range.

When downloading from the Internet, your request goes from your PC to your router via wireless, then through the wire to the Internet, then back to your router and finally to your PC wireless. Basically, you are passing via wireless only 2 times.

When transferring files from/to your other wireless computers, your request goes from your PC to your router, then wireless again from your router to your other PC, then back wireless to your router to finally arrive wireless to your initial PC. You are passing via wireless 4 times, so you have more opportunity to slow the transmission down due to poor signal quality. Also, the trips from router to PC are different for both PCs due to different signal conditions (even if they are sitting right on top of each other).

Transfers are never done directly PC-to-PC. They always pass through the gateway (router).